I was talking to a colleague the other day about this new situation that has caught us all by surprise. She says that these days remind her of the spring of 1986, when the Chernobyl explosion occurred. Sunny, spring days that simply beckon you to go outside. Nature is waking up, flowers are blooming, a scene like something out of a fairy tale – but it's actually something out of a horror movie. Instead of being bustling with people, the streets are empty. You want to go outside to enjoy this beautiful weather, but you can't. You can't because it's dangerous. What a strange feeling.
What is happening? Why are the streets and squares empty? They are being attacked by an enemy – so small that it is invisible to the naked eye, and yet so powerful that in just a few days it brought the entire world to its knees. I was not born during the Chernobyl disaster, but many of you were. And only now can I at least roughly understand what it felt like.
The uncontrolled spread of the coronavirus has caused different reactions in us. Some have "death of fear" and are spending their time on portals, reading the latest news, while frantically disinfecting their italy whatsapp data hands, and worrying about the future. Others are still sitting leisurely over coffee, as if nothing is happening. How is that? What is going on in our heads? What has this little invisible enemy done to make us have such polarized attitudes and thoughts?
I will explain both extremes. Let's start with a group of people who may not have slept for days due to worry and uncertainty, and whose hands are almost bloody from the dryness caused by various disinfectants. We are witnessing manic shopping for non-perishable food in grocery stores and fights for toilet paper. While the shelves with hygiene products are gaping empty, the owners of these stores are rubbing their hands with satisfaction at the increased turnover.
Okay, maybe 50 packs of toilet paper is really too much. However, for some reason, all that amount of people “flowed” into shopping centers and forced them to fill their shopping carts, and consequently, the shelves with supplies. The coronavirus, to put it mildly, “sowed” a lot of fear in its wake. Fear is a very powerful emotion that has the ability to change our behavior almost instantly. When present in extremely large quantities, it can make us do even crazy things. It’s as if we completely lose our realistic perception of reality. Just as an anorexic girl in the mirror still sees herself as fat, so we obviously consider our cart overflowing with toilet paper to be insufficiently full.
I used toilet paper as just one example. These “crazy” behaviors can also result in us literally washing our hands every five minutes, because we start to see the infection everywhere around us. So over time, we stop touching the things around us, and we are constantly checking the latest information about the development of the disease and new cases. Various negative thoughts start to “roll” around our heads – about infection, getting sick, an uncertain future, dark scenarios, doom and whatnot. This can greatly impair our psychological well-being.